The Design Thinking approach is a human-centered approach used to discover unmet needs and opportunities and convert them to create value through customer experience (Brown, 2010; Lockwood, 2009). The approach is based on applying designers' methods to solve problems, especially management issues, through a process based on the following steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation (Brown, 2010). Understanding users' needs is crucial in this innovation process, especially in the early stages, to identify what users really need. Therefore, many designers develop "empathy" towards consumers through in-depth visual observations and ethnographic research techniques (Leonard and Rayport, 1997).
It is a way to positively affect idea generation and product superiority (Veryzer and Borja de Mozota, 2005). Designers are more likely to identify new solutions that will lead to new product offers (Brown, 2010) by representing these ideas using different tools such as sketches or prototypes. These tools help make communication more efficient, enabling teams to focus on a tangible production-ready solution (Utterback & al., 2006; Brown, 2010).
Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategies. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human perspective with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who are not trained designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges (IDEO Design Thinking approach).
The Design Thinking (DT) approach (Figure 14) used for the case with Infosys is adapted from the IDEO Design thinking process, which focuses attention on the user to arrive at the right solution for the problem. The process starts from an empathic perspective and encourages participants to view the situation and product through the end-users' eyes to increase the desirability of the AR solution being co-designed. It is an iterative process that moves from generating insights about end-users to defining the right problems to solve, idea generation and prototyping, and finally testing.
Figure 14. Infosys Design Thinking approach
One of the most critical aspects of the AR solution is understanding how the selected technology and its characteristics provide the desired retail customer experience and whether that is viable for the retailer and customer. The user experience is more than usability, perception, or customer adoption patterns; it deals with the emotional interaction with the AR technology and the physical and virtual environments in which it operates.
The data organized from the interviews and focus groups are used to visualize the required experience from using an AR solution. The solutions created in the visualization phase are enhanced by considering the role technology can play to solve the problems at scale. It is like envisioning the application even if it appears to be beyond the current development tools' capacity. The visualizations are then crafted into early experiments. Users can experience the early versions of the visualizations to confirm if they align with expectations or need further modifications.
The process goes through five constructs, each a phase that works with stakeholders, leveraging templates and conversations.
Empathy: is to look at the needs of the users, not only to gather user requirements but also uncovering what users would like to experience. Creating an empathy map is an outcome of this phase; it helps with a clear view of each stage of the experience where impact can be made, and related problems faced. The user problems surfaced at this phase might be inaccurate visibility of images or the display or inadequate response from retailers during the user journey. Ease of use and fulfilling needs are parts of user
experience. The psychological aspect of the users towards the AR-based experiences could be captured in this phase. This phase's outcomes would vary according to relevant customers' persona – ranging from the millennial, digitally savvy buyer to the digital adopter. For this corporate professional, the application
of digital to their physical experiences enhances their convenience and comfort. These experiences are drawn out as customer journey maps.
Define: is the process by which the designer arrives at a meaningful and actionable problem statement and is likely the most challenging part of the design. It requires the designer to synthesize observations, insights about users, and the user's stated and unstated needs, based on the empathy phase. This phase leverages templates to define problems specific to each persona to alleviate the pain from the problem spaces and multiply the gains and positive experiences.
Ideation: This is perhaps the most critical milestone in enhancing the user experience. It deals with facing the users' challenges and generating various innovative solutions to the findings of the empathy phase. Ideas come with experience or by sharing. They also come from borrowing from similar situations faced by other industries unrelated to the current context. Solutions could range from higher image resolution to larger displays, from quicker response to problems encountered in different stages of the empathy map to the ease of use of current experiences, hence fulfilling critical user experience needs.
The focus is on generating many ideas in the first phase of ideation while not considering too closely or pondering the ideas' quality, feasibility, or viability. The idea is to encourage sharing and
cross-pollination of perspectives to find unique ways to solve the problem. The second phase of ideation encourages learners to consider the feasibility and viability of ideas generated. It also is the crucial phase that brings in the lens of solving the problem at scale. It requires consideration of the opportunities and limitations provided during the prototyping phase.
The key is to combine ideas that have been generated in meaningful ways to bring about desirable, feasible, and viable solutions at scale.
Prototyping: involves the implementation and testing of solutions in an agile manner. It is the phase that allows the designer to take the idea that it is in their head and bring it to reality in the simplest possible way. Prototypes can range from paper prototypes to storyboarding to screen prototypes. It allows the user to experience the solution as envisaged by the designer.
Test: This is the phase where users test the solution prototype in their real-life settings. Ideally, the user experiences this without guidance. Testing is crucial to producing an application that is reliable and answers to user expectations. The element of surprise or extra excitement is a plus, a differentiator in user experience.
AR blends reality with a computer-generated layer to make user experiences more meaningful through engaging interactions. Questions typically asked within the DT approach relate to three overlapping constraints: desirability, feasibility, and viability. It's helpful to measure the effort needed to execute a solution with the potential payoff in terms of desired outcomes, whether monetary or some other quantifiable measure. If the investment far outweighs the benefits, it may be worth focusing on a different solution.
The Design Thinking process enables the co-design and development of an AR solution in line with user participation and feedback. The retailer and customer understand the expected customer experience and what the solution provides, with its shortcomings and limitations, including commercialization and costs for implementation and usage.
The Infosys Design Thinking approach was used in this case over four months to engage RL and customers upfront in the understanding of what AR technologies offer, what benefits they get by using the technology, and how it can enrich retail experience and usage.
Applying the Design Thinking approach to select an AR solution
The empathy phase was centered on enhancing customer convenience in-store, personalizing the experience, and offering choice. RL wanted to enhance the retail experience by providing product information and options to customers without them looking for clothing physically and trying them out, reducing the returns of clothes due to misfit, and dealing with negative customer feedback that impacts the experience. RL wanted to have an opportunity for customers to reach out to a sales associate if they needed to, have the ability to transact in a language of their choice to create a sense of personalization, as well as offer other products as up-sell options to the customers to go with their product selections.
Empathy Conversations: Interviews and focus groups were conducted with users (the retailer and other stakeholders) across segments in-store and online, and these were the insights gained:
• Personalizing meant that customers were keen on a variety of options and on an experience that elevated their sense of self and ownership during the buying experience.
• Because RL is a luxury brand, an observation was around a shifting customer base with more current generation customers spending time with luxury brands. These time-starved customers were seeking the best available shopping experiences that met their needs of any time anywhere.
• One of the most common mentions was the inconvenience of leaving the dressing room to find an alternate size or color after selecting the apparel design.
Define: Defining the focus areas was a journey in itself. With available technology, there is more significant potential to work on customers' desirability goals. Technology solutions could range from leveraging cameras and sensors to projection and reflection. Following the discussions, the focus chosen was to enhance the fitting room retail experience for the customer.
The users that impacted this experience ranged from the fitting room personnel to the store operations manager who needed to plan and manage staffing to suit fitting room usage. An additional stakeholder was the merchandising team: the fitting room retail experience for the customer and data that emerged from this would help merchandisers understand if their apparel had crossed the soft hurdle of trials as they moved from the shelf to the fitting room.
Ideate: The team worked out wild and wacky ideas leveraging thoughts from cross-industry ideas and implementations of AR and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to enhance the retail experience. They included the convenience of getting input without trying outfits, cameras scanning body shape and suggesting sizes for best fit, colors that would best suit the customer, and notifications to sales staff to bring appropriate alternatives as per the customer's choice without them having to step out of the fitting room.
There were also explorations on upselling, which from the customer's eyes would be alternative accessories and apparel that would go well with the one they have chosen, or the mirror sharing
notifications with them and interacting with them live. Other ideas included selecting the language they wanted to interact in, choosing to delay making decisions via sending the information of filtered choices to their email, and offering other products that go with selected products, creating upselling opportunities for RL.
While this exploration was possible by leveraging technology, it was also important not to create a new problem while solving an existing one. An example that was discussed in this case was that cameras could significantly enhance convenience for customers. However, this could be seen and experienced as an invasion of privacy and needed to be considered with care. One of the outputs from this session was using customer journey maps to identify the themes to create the prototypes.
The customer shopping journey maps were created using Post-It notes posted on a white wall. The team would walk around to theme them and remove parts of the journey that either created friction in the flow or was considered a nice-to-have versus a must-have capability. The journey used for prototyping from the ideation sessions is visualized below in Figure 15.
Figure 15. Journey map used for prototyping
Prototypes and testing were done, keeping feasibility and viability in mind. RFID technology was leveraged to manage the privacy concern that had emerged. The RFID scanners protected the customer's privacy, but created friction and disturbed the seamlessness of the experience. Mirrors were interactive screens that shared apparel color options and allowed the customer to choose sizes or other preferred alternatives. The screen and related computers also worked to serve notifications via text messages to the fitting room staff, enabling the customer to not step out of the fitting room. The customer could change the fitting room lighting, request a different size, browse through other items in the store, or interact with a sale associate through the mirror (Figure 16 interactive mirror). Appendix 12 illustrates the resulting customer journey post installing the smart mirrors in RL
Figure 16. The RL experience post installing the interactive mirrors